Algorithms in Africa

Maybe the rush to market for spreading internet access across the globe isn't in anyone's best interest—a report from the front.

Eleven years ago I installed a computer
system at a vocational training and development center in Tutume,
Botswana. Tutume is a rural village on the northeastern edge of the
Kgalagadi desert in southern Africa. The computer was intended to
help this organization, known as Tutume Brigades, catch up on its
bookkeeping for several business units crucial to the local
economy. Businesses included a brick-making unit, carpentry
workshop, auto repair garage, sorghum mill, school uniform
production unit, tractor hire and vegetable garden. For the local
village and the surrounding catchment era, the Brigades were
literally the only game in the bush for commodities, trade skills,
training and employment opportunities.

When I arrived in Tutume, I was a pure novice in the field of
foreign assistance. I was also a mid-career financial professional,
with several years of experience in nonprofit and health-care
management in the United States. And like most aid workers new on
the ground in Africa, I knew what was best. In my assessment of the
center, I believed a computer was essential to get a handle on the
Brigades' financial position, which otherwise consisted of eight
separate sets of badly maintained manual ledgers, over nine months
in arrears. Except for the bank statements of eight separate
checking accounts (and even the bank statements proved unreliable),
we had no way of knowing if the center had any money. Every time we
had to make payroll or buy another truckload of cement, we were in
the heart of fiscal darkness.

Over the course of the next several months, I proceeded to
computerize the records and train local staff in basic operation of
the system. By the end of the first year, the financial records of
the center were timely and accurate. Moreover, other staff members
were beginning to use the computer for tasks such as word
processing and spreadsheets. Many of these employees had never even
used a typewriter before.

If I were to tell no more of this story and fade here to one
of the glorious Kgalagadi sunsets, this might be called a win.
Although set in the predawn (and pre-Linux) history of the Internet
era, today this would be described as a small success story of
“bridging the digital divide” in Africa—like I was a regular
Albert Schweitzer of the Information Age or something.

But the truth is not so simple, and the issues of foreign
assistance are not so trivial. The fact is, I am not proud of this
story. Because as my time in Tutume went on, I realized I had
blundered badly, to the point of putting the Brigades in serious
jeopardy. I began to ask myself such basic questions as: What would
happen to the computer after I left? Was the staff fully capable of
operating the system independently? Would backups be maintained and
performed rigorously? Were skills sufficient to troubleshoot
problems and reinstall the system if necessary? If the equipment
failed or was stolen, could the center afford to replace it? And
what would the center do when the staff I had trained for so long
were lured away by more lucrative jobs in the big city?

These questions all led to the same answer: the Brigades
would be left in even worse shape than I found them. Rather than
gaining empowerment, independence and enablement, they would more
than likely be left powerless, dependent and possibly ruined. And
all because of my own cultural myopia, despite my good
intentions.

It is axiomatic in the field of foreign assistance that the
aid program will take credit for the successes, while failures are
blamed on the host country. The psychology of failure can then be
even more severe and long-lasting than the loss of the project.
While I was working in Tutume, for example, a friend of mine was
working in the village of Lobatse in southern Botswana. Seven years
earlier, an aid organization from northern Europe had decided a
wool sweater factory would be just the ticket for the economic
development of the village. Of course, northern Europeans are fond
of nice wool sweaters and very likely have great need for them,
particularly in the colder climes of northern Europe. The market
for wool sweaters is less extensive in the sweltering and sparsely
populated Kgalagadi desert, however. After seven years of
subsidizing the losses of the operation, the aid organization
finally decided it was never going to be sustainable, and they
pulled the plug on the effort. My friend's unenviable assignment
was to put all the women out of work, sell the facility and
liquidate the equipment. It was hard for many of the women not to
feel that the fault was somehow their own.

Fortunately for Brigades in Tutume, such failure was averted.
As the story there continues, once I realized the risks, I spent
the next several months converting the accounting system back to
manual ledgers, hiring and training additional staff in bookkeeping
procedures and enabling them to use the computer primarily as a
support system, rather than as the central financial
database.

But what do these stories from Tutume and Lobatse have to do
with Linux and emerging markets? The rest of this article will
consider that question.

I am moved by your article. You have made some valid points, often times people of developed countries think that what those of developing countries need is advance IT and related services. When it actual fact this is not so.

What I think they must remember, is that, development is a process and there are certain key elements that are fundamental to this process:
1. basic fundamental education
2. sustainability.
3. Consistence
4. Vision.

Without these development will never happen. Countries of the developed world started out with these principles. I think it would be extremely difficult to go around these fundamental priniciples to acheived the coveted prized to be called "a developed country".

Inspiring story. As a linux tech installing servers in Africa, Asia and Latin America to support our international development organisation, i found this well worth the read. My job is to connect all our local offices to our emailsystem.

Though we install linuxservers as firewalls and mail servers, we do the maintenance ourselves. For local LAN's we always advise to choose something that can be supported locally, rather than something we fancy and like, though we are working on a simple manual for local administrators, and suggesting simple windowsconfigurations for which we can offer support. Furthermore, we are encouraging contacts between administrators in the regions we operate in. This is mainly determined by language (i.e. french in West Africa).

So, while we feel that open source is more in the spirit of our core "business", development, than proprietary software, and we are certainly encouraging the use of it (I always leave plenty CD's for the local administrators to play with), we also run into the fact that local support for its use is not always available, making it quite impossible to install it on a larger scale than we do now. Like you state in your example, there's nothing good about installing systems that can't be "repaired" if you're not around while at the same time making people dependent on them.

Being a techie that chose to work in the international development field rather than the fast telecom/ict sector, I'll install linux wherever I can. But not at all costs.

Found this article through another paper I'd read by Alan Story (Law Dept., Kent University, UK) which was a report to the UK CIPR (Commission on Intellectual Property Rights)[<B>www.iprcommission.org/papers/pdfs/ study_papers/sp5_story_study.pdf</B>] in which it is extensively quoted.

I am so delighted and thankful for your article. Though a native of Burundi (Central Africa) , I have learned so much from you than in my many years growing up in Africa .

Assuming that we now know what has gone wrong with Africa , why is it that we can not scale up the efforts from best practices to the whole african continent ? What is it standing in the way for a sustainable progress ?